INTERVIEW : Jenny Qi by Lauren C. Johnson
Focal Point
Jenny Qi
Steel Toe Books
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
Jenny Qi’s poetry was born from necessity. After she lost her mother to cancer when she was 19, Qi’s grief took the shape of the 500 paper cranes she folded, and the 100 poems she wrote while completing her Ph.D. in Biomedical Science from UCSF. The poems in Qi’s debut collection, Focal Point from Steel Toe Books, contain Qi’s personal grief as well as reflections on collective grief in the face of bigotry, racism, and xenophobia.
Loss is a predominate theme throughout the collection, but Focal Point is as much of a love song as it is a lament. Qi’s poems are dynamic and crackle with moments of hope and joy; a favorite of mine is “Telomeres & a 2AM (Love) Poem”:
But now I think
mad thoughts
like how maybe you
could be an exception
and how maybe I
could do this every night
and how maybe we
could let our telomeres
shorten
together
With a background in oncology and science communication, it’s no surprise Qi has written love poems about telomeres. Qi brings the language of the laboratory into this collection with the precision you would expect from a scientist. Indeed, Qi’s expertise is extensive; she’s currently a competitive intelligence manager in oncology and has written about medical humanities, health insurance policy, diversity in medicine, and so much more for academic and journalistic publications. She was also a co-founder, co-host and producer of the Bone Lab Radio podcast.
I saw so many echoes of Qi’s medical humanities work in Focal Point. Eager to discuss these exquisite poems and the way Qi has merged two seemingly divergent career paths in literature and science, I reached out to Qi for email interview. Here is our conversation edited lightly for brevity.
_____________
Lauren C. Johnson: To begin, I’d love to discuss your extensive background in oncology and work as a science communicator. How does your process for writing poetry mirror and/or contrast with your process for your scientific writing?
Jenny Qi: When I first started doing science journalism, it was partly an effort to bridge my interests in science and writing. I particularly liked doing interviews with interesting people and highlighting the humanity of science and scientists. I suppose writing poetry isn’t so different from that, as there are similarities between writing a persona poem and writing a profile of a person—in both cases you’re trying to understand and connect with someone else, though there are some rules in journalism and other writing forms that poetry doesn’t need to follow. There are some similarities even with writing about a research project in a scientific manuscript. My professor always talked about research papers as stories, and that’s not so different from a poetry book—in both cases, you’re trying to put these discrete pieces of work together, sometimes out of chronological order, to build a cohesive arc.
LCJ: To that point, I absolutely love how everyday moments from the lab make their way into your poems. In “Laboratory Observations” for example, an unhappy grad student looks “at ease for once...parading about the lab with his baby in his arms.” The way the speaker empathizes with the laboratory mice in “Point at Which Parallel Waves Converge and From Which Diverge” also struck me.
In your scientific work, which observations become research notes, and which become poems?
JQ: I wanted that section of the book to resemble a poetic lab notebook, but the poems are distinct from what I would have entered into an actual lab notebook. In lab notebooks, I recorded experimental protocols, what I did, and what happened as it pertained to the results and protocol. They became poems if my observations triggered some sort of (subjective) reflection or recollection, which happened a lot in the beginning when I was learning how to do things, taking classes, and engaging more with history and theory. The animal work, of course, triggered a lot of emotion and painful memories, and that was probably where my experimental observations bled into poem territory the most. I think “Point…” was the only mouse poem I managed to write that wasn’t terribly maudlin.
LCJ: This book truly is a love letter to your mother. After I read this collection, I read some of your articles, including your essay in The Atlantic, “My Mother Deserved to Die Comfortably.” So much of the writing in this article mirrors the scenes and dialogue in your poem, “Last Visitation.”
In addition to writing essays, why did you turn to poetry as a container for your grief? What do you think poetry can do as a container for grief that perhaps other forms of writing cannot?
JQ: Poetry helped me live with and work through my grief. I don’t think I had much of a choice: there were entire years in which I was so wild with grief that nothing else felt accessible.
I probably say this a lot, but I feel there’s an emotional honesty and urgency that can exist in poems more so than other genres. Poems don’t necessarily require a plot or smooth transitions between scenes or even logic, so they can live in and more accurately represent the dream/grief realm, at least for me. Additionally, unlike essays, a poem is not (necessarily) trying to convince you of anything or trying to be “productive” in any way. It’s just holding space.
This reminds of a poem that Gabrielle Calvocoressi recently published in Poetry Magazine titled, “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.” In this poem, the narrator speaks to someone who isn’t there anymore, and it’s so plainspoken and devastating.
LCJ: The poems in Focal Point are very precise, and I really admire how your language choices and structure feel so deliberate. “Telomeres & a 2AM (Love) Poem” is a great example of your precision. Like the telomeres for which the poem is named, the lines in this poem get shorter and shorter, until they’re only one word.
When you’re writing or revising, how do you know you’ve chosen the right poem structure to support what you want to say?
JQ: Thank you for this observation—I’m glad to hear it. Honestly, I’m not always so certain that the form is right for the poem, and that is often a choice made during revision. It’s interesting to me that you picked out “Telomeres,” as that’s one of the few poems with a more unique structure that came out more or less fully formed.
I like the idea of form mirroring content, and when I wrote that poem, I was in a phase of intentionally playing with formal variation in my poems. I think I wrote “How men deal” around the same time, and I wanted it to appear as if you used the Justify alignment for a paragraph. Truthfully, I didn’t consciously know why that felt right, but when I workshopped it, my group commented that it felt like an explosion of anger within the rigid confines of the box structure, and that felt so true to the spirit of the poem.
More often, when I’m first drafting a poem, my inclination is to write in couplets, four-line stanzas, or all in one big stanza, so one of the things I’ll often do during revision is play around with form, maybe make the lines really long or really short and see how that feels. The very first poem, for example, “Point At Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge,” came out as four-line stanzas in which the lines were all about the same length. I thought something was missing but couldn’t figure out what, so I took it to a workshop with Victoria Chang at the Omnidawn Poetry Conference, and she suggested that perhaps the poem had not yet found its final form. She was completely right. I had kind of a Eureka moment after that workshop, and I decided to use those couplets with varying line lengths to mirror the “parallel waves” in the title.
LCJ: I noticed that the word “cells” is interspersed throughout this collection 14 times, and I thought the “Biology Lesson” poems particularly play with the word, “cells” in such evocative ways. Could you speak to some of the multiple meanings cells have in your poems and what cells mean to you?
JQ: The “Biology Lesson” poems came from a place of learning about cell biology early in grad school and noting parallels between individual cells and individual humans made up of many cells, and what happens to those individuals in a larger system. That’s something I often think about in several different contexts—the building blocks of systems, how a whole can become more than the sum of its parts, how the parts are dependent on the whole. I think that’s why I gravitated towards cell biology.
And even earlier in grad school, instead of writing poems about cells, I drew little cartoons anthropomorphizing them; cancer cells became these renegade pirate figures rebelling against their own system. In biology, a cell is defined as “the smallest unit that can live on its own,” and it was interesting to me to think about and observe the ways that is or is not true.
LCJ: Writing that plays with mythology, folk, and fairy tales will always be a great literary love of mine, so I was delighted to see your poems, “Circe in the Mirror” and “Penelope Looks Back.” To that point, it seems like Circe and other women from mythology are having a moment in art and pop culture, from Madeline Miller’s novel, Circe to the web comic, Lore Olympus. But I’m curious about your take–why were you attracted to write from the perspective of these famous, mythical women?
JQ: Mine too! I really enjoy retellings of myths and fairy/folk tales and find them deeply comforting. Early in the pandemic, I tracked down and devoured everything Madeline Miller wrote. I used to write more short stories as a kid, and I liked the practice of inventing a character who was totally unlike me and learning a kind of radical empathy by writing from that character’s perspective.
When I started writing poems, I initially wrote a lot of persona poems because that felt natural, and I think as an adolescent, it was a way to understand myself and new experiences I had by identifying and connecting with someone else. Circe and Penelope are characters I didn’t particularly like or agree with as a child. I wrote these poems after getting older and gaining a new perspective on them and why they might have made the choices they did.
LCJ: Many of these poems underscore a specific grief that comes from being perceived as an other. “Transplant” and “About Face” speak to racism against the AAPI community and “Dear Steve” and “Commonalities” address homophobia and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando. I also see echoes of these themes in poems like “Casino,” which capture the feeling of estrangement while navigating an exploitative landscape.
I see the poems in this book as very much in conversation with one another. Could you speak to your process for organizing this collection so that the poems could best drive that conversation?
JQ: really cannot emphasize enough how much I didn’t know what I was doing when I first started the process of putting the book together, so I’m gratified to hear this. I wanted to organize this collection in a way that mirrored the ongoing process of grief and made room for the many other losses around the central loss.
I started putting the collection together around 2016, and as time went on, I needed this book to also hold space for other, communal griefs. My friend Preeti Vangani, who wrote Mother Tongue Apologize, had some great advice for assembling a cohesive collection, which I am paraphrasing here:
1. Try to make sure the first section hints at all of the themes to come, and that these themes develop in some way throughout the collection.
2. Consider what work each poem is doing in service of your themes and story arc, and if two poems are doing the same work, consider cutting one of them.
I’m sure she worded it better, but these are things I kept in mind as I organized the poems for the final time.
LCJ: The way you’ve merged your literary and scientific careers is so fascinating! From writing this collection, to practicing medical journalism, to creating the truly rad, Bone Lab Radio podcast, your storytelling has underscored a need to bring art and the humanities into the medical sciences. I’m so curious, what’s next on your horizon that you’re really looking forward to?
JQ: I sometimes (often?) feel like I’m being pulled in different directions and like I’m floundering in everything, so this is really nice to hear. Throughout this publication process and outside of my day job, I’ve been mostly working on essays rather than poems, and I’m excited to spend some time in a different genre.
I’m finally working through a lot of the issues and topics that were buried or delayed when I was reeling from grief, and nonfiction seems to be the genre that’s working for me right now for those things.
I’m early in the process of translating my mom’s books, which tie into some of that, and I’m looking forward to finally applying to residencies to work on these more time-and-emotional energy-intensive projects. Also, while sending this book out, I started thinking and writing poems about technology and machine learning, and the parallels between artificial systems and human systems/societies; those ideas are still marinating.
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, Rattle, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S.
Her new collection of poetry–Focal Point–is available for purchase now.
Lauren C. Johnson is a writer living in San Francisco.
